The Money Files

Data protection has been a hot topic this year because of GDPR coming into force in the EU earlier in 2018. Other countries are following – keeping customer, supplier and staff data confidential is so important. Data breaches have massive implications for projects and organisations.

As you know, much of this regular blog is all about budgeting and project financials, so I have come up with some ways to financially incentivise you to take data protection seriously on your projects – if you weren’t already.

Here are 5 ways that data protection can help you reduce the overall cost of your project.

1. Avoid Fines

Get your project requirements right and you are less likely to implement something that puts you at risk of regulatory fines.

Regulations vary from country to country but many jurisdictions have strict penalties and the potential for fines for data breaches. Thinking about data protection can protect your project from being the cause of a data breach and opening up the organisation to fines.

2. Preserve Your Reputation

Do you really want your project to be the reason the company makes the front page of the financial news? Data loss and breaches can cause significant reputational damage to companies.

Putting data protection at the heart of what you deliver on your project also has a positive effect. Consumers are more interested in data protection now than ever before (at least, that’s how it seems to me). So you may gain market share and more acceptance for your project because you’ve taken data concerns seriously.

3. Avoid Litigation

It isn’t just regulatory fines and regulatory bodies that may take action against your company. Members of the public (including staff) can also bring claims against your company due to data loss. After all, if your personal details were made public in a way that caused you loss or damaged your reputation, wouldn’t you want some justice for the situation?

If individuals are not interested in financial payouts for themselves, they may want to bring what they see as large corporations who haven’t acted fairly into the spotlight. The intention may be to damage the reputation of your firm through a court case, or simply to make sure that companies like yours take data protection seriously. A claim could be motivated by someone not wanting others to suffer the indiscretions that they themselves have been subject to.

4. Shine a Light on Problems

Experienced project managers know that fixing problems early in a project is the way to make changes cheaply. It’s more expensive to change a product the further along the project timeline it is. The more work that’s been done, the more needs to be undone, changed and done again.

Looking at data protection and privacy early on in the project helps you shine a light on things that might be an issue. For example, you can spot where, say, an IT project gathers information that might be intrusive to privacy, so you can rethink the data collected by the software. Or you could incorporate more security protocols to boost customer confidence in your software. Even small things, like training new staff recruited to work in your new shop, can be planned for and managed easier if the requirements are identified at the beginning of a project.

5. Improve Staff Morale and Loyalty

Data protection isn’t the most exciting of subjects, but staff see training as an investment in their careers. If you build data protection training into the way your project is deployed, or for your team members working on the project deliverables, you can influence their intention to stay with the company. Training and investing in people can improve staff morale.

In reality, I don’t think anyone is going to declare undying loyalty to your business just because you offered them data protection training as part of your project, but it contributes to the overall feeling that staff have about the business. Especially about the organisation’s commitment to staff development.

However, it’s also a way to improve staff retention. If you can give team members skills that they can use going forward, they are more likely to be useful to the business. Research by PwC shows that 74% of people are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain in order to remain employable – and I’m sure that data protection and data privacy are topics that are definitely going to be needed in the future.

So how do you build data protection into your project plan?

Incorporating Data Protection into Project Plans

Data protection considerations can be built into your project plans early. Make data protection and privacy implications part of the non-functional requirements for the project.

Use a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) document template to help you identify potential pitfalls in the project.

There’s more information about what needs to go in a DPIA and what it is for on the ICO website, along with a sample DPIA template (scroll down). The ICO is the UK data regulator. You may find that your own country’s data regulator/information commissioner has a template they would prefer you to use, or that is written in your language.

The point of a DPIA is to bring to the front of people’s minds the fact that personal data is a big part of your project. It helps you ask the right questions about the project and what it is going to deliver. Then you can make sure you are thinking about the right things for your requirements such as database security, minimising the amount of data collected, access rights and destruction policies and more.

Not sure what topics you should be thinking about? Here are 10 data protection considerations for your project to get you started off in the right direction.

Overall, data protection can be a costly issue for businesses, so it really does pay to get your privacy requirements set up correctly from the start. If you do this, you can avoid budget overruns and project delays because you’ll be getting data protection right first time.

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Regular readers will know that I’ve been doing a series called What’s New In the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition. Recently we’ve been looking at Project Resource Management. However, it’s been so long since the Sixth Edition came out that it doesn’t feel right to call these articles ‘What’s New’ any longer. So today we are carrying on the overview of the project management processes with Project Schedule Management but as a ‘deep dive’ instead.

Don’t worry, I’m still taking the same approach and calling out the differences between the current and previous versions.

The main difference, at Knowledge Area level, is that this section used to be called Project Time Management. Personally, I’m grateful that the name has been changed. Time management also makes me think of personal productivity, Pomodoro, timesheets and things like that. Schedule management is a title that speaks more specifically to the management of time as relates to project tasks.

Overall, this topic is all about getting a detailed plan that talks about how and when the project will achieve the outputs (whatever was set in the project scope). The schedule is the main output of the whole Knowledge Area and it’s helpful for managing expectations, communication and tracking and reporting progress.

So… let’s get started with a deep dive into the processes.

Plan Schedule Management Process

This is the first process in the Knowledge Area. We’re in the Planning process group.

This process is all about planning how you are going to make your plan. Yes, even creating a project schedule needs some effort in planning!

It feels like much of this process will be things you do automatically or don’t have much to plan for because the boundaries are set by your corporate processes and governance.

Inputs

There’s actually no change in the inputs between the PMBOK Guide® -- Fifth Edition and Sixth Edition. The inputs are:

• Project management plan
• Project charter
• Enterprise environmental factors
• Organisational process assets.

No surprises, no real explanation needed.

Tools & Techniques

There is a small change here for this process. Analytical techniques has been removed and replaced with Data analysis.

It’s semantics really. Data analysis does give the impression of being broader, and more in line with the trend towards big data and data science. So what does ‘data analysis’ actually mean?

It can include a range of tools or techniques that allow you to dig into and analyse the data in a number of ways as they relate to producing a project schedule. For example:

• Deciding how often you should review your plan (I’m not sure this is data analysis – it feels more decision making to me – maybe if you base your decision on some kind of data it would count)
• Deciding on what schedule methodology to use (again, this doesn’t feel like ‘analysis’ – it’s more about making the best decision based on what corporate methods are in use and what you think would be the best fit for the project. If you can’t work it out yourself, you’ll get input from someone with more experience of the PMO. There’s not much analysis involved)
• The duration of waves, if you are going to do rolling wave analysis
• Deciding on how much detail to add into your schedule (I feel like I’ve made my point…)

Outputs

The output hasn’t changed either. The output is a schedule management plan i.e. something that defines what form your schedule takes. How long waves (or sprints) will be, what methodology to use where you have a choice, what level is detail is required to manage the plan.

I don’t think I have ever worked on a project where I have produced a plan about how to manage my schedule. Generally, there might be a paragraph in the Project Initiation Document that says I’ll follow the corporate standards and that’s that. I expect there are some types of mega project where this type of planning for the plan is required, but if you have some experience managing projects and a low complexity project, you will probably be able to make those decisions intuitively and not need to justify yourself by writing a whole document about them. What do you think?

Next time I’ll be looking at Define Activities.

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Strategy plays a huge part in whether or not your project is going to be a success. Yes – things decided way above your pay grade influence the outcomes of your project.

That happens through risk. The corporate approach to strategy (or lack of it) massively shapes how your project is going to be carried out, implemented and delivered. The framework in which your project is being managed is of course influential – I’d say it was one of the enterprise environmental factors that shapes how you need to act on the project.

The risk profile of your project changes depending on your project’s context. A project in my company will have different outcomes to the same project (even if we hypothetically believed it would be delivered by the same project team) because the corporate approach to project management is different. The risk appetite would be different.

Strategy brings risk to your project in numerous ways. I’ve called out three of the main strategic factors that influence risk on your project in the video below.

Read more articles about risk.

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Virtual meetings can be a huge time and cost saver, but the last thing you need is to be stuck on project calls that take up all day.

If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you will have been on calls where you’ve sneakily gone on mute because the meeting isn’t relevant to you, or you have nothing to add, or some other reason. While it’s better not to multi-task during a virtual meeting, and even better to not go to meetings that aren’t relevant for you, sometimes virtual meetings are a must.

You can make virtual meetings better. This quick video shares 3 easy tips for making virtual meetings that little bit more productive for everyone.

These tips came from a fantastic presentation on virtual meetings at a PMI event by Dr Penny Pullan. You can read more about that presentation here.

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In this instalment of What’s New In the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, we’ve made it to the end of Project Resource Management. The only thing remaining to cover is trends and tailoring.

Trends and tailoring is a relatively short section for each Knowledge Area, but it is helpful because it reminds you that the book is only a guide. You can make it relevant to the way you work, your organisational culture and the needs of your team by tailoring the way you implement the processes.

So what’s it all about for resource management?

Trends and Emerging Practices

The big shift in resource management – although I’d argue this is hardly new and has been with us here in the UK at least for some considerable time – is the move away from the command and control structure of old. Collaboration and supportive management is in. Telling people what to do is out.

Because of the culture of businesses I have worked in, I find it hard to accept that this is worthy of mention as a trend, but I can’t speak for how things are in the rest of the world. Plus, I do know that despite businesses saying they are all modern and collaborative, when it comes to delegating decision making they tend to be a little bit more reticent.

There are some particular emerging practices called out.

Methods

The main guidance in the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition is to look at what is in operation in your business and manage your project in line with that. If your company has adopted Kaizen, just in time manufacturing, or any other management buzzwords for productivity and managing throughput of work, then you’ll need to make your project management practices fit around those.

Emotional Intellignece

Given that Anthony Mersino’s book  on Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers came out in 2007 (and is now in its second edition), this again feels a little behind the curve. However, we are all a work in progress and it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that a team with good EI skills are more effective and benefit from a reduced staff turnover.

Self-organising teams

As more and more projects take on agile approaches, teams become self-organising. I like this way of working. I think that trusting people to get the job done is empowering and teams can be very effective this way.

However, as with all teams, I do think you need to keep an eye on how things are going to make sure that everyone is contributing and that the right things are being worked on.

Self-organising teams seem to work best when the work is generalist and the people are generalist i.e. they can serve multiple roles within the team to get the work done. You couldn’t have a self-organising surgical team, for example, but it can work with multi-skilled IT roles.

The personalities in the team are also important. You want people who can take feedback on board and flex to the ongoing needs of the team and the business. And they need to be able to provide feedback as well.

Virtual teams

Virtual, or distributed teams are also not really a trend in my opinion. I remember speaking about the rise of virtual teams at a conference over a decade ago. Personally I don’t think it’s relevant to include them as a ‘trend’ but they are definitely a cause for tailoring your project approach. You need diffferent tools and techniques to get work done in a virtual enviornment.

Communications technology becomes even more important, as does trust. You need to work harder to build a sense of team and shared goals, because working virtually can feel lonely. Plus you have the practical concerns of time zone differences, culture and language.

Tailoring

Take all of the above into account when thinking of how you are going to make your own personal project managemetn of the team work. The PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition calls out several areas to consider:

• What is the background of the team in terms of diversity?
• Where are team members and physical resources located?
• What industry-specific resources are required?
• How are you going to get people to work on the team?
• Are team members part time or full time for the project?
• How are you going to develop the team and provide training, and how will the diverse needs of the team be met with regards to delivering training?
• What life cycle approach will the project use?

These are all good questiions to be asking yourself about how to manage project resources.

Agile/Adaptive Environment Considerations

Finally, the section on ‘making project resource management work for you’ ends with considerations for teams working in an agile or adaptive environment.

The PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition makes the point that if your project has high variability, you may be best served with a self-organising team of highly skilled and multi-skilled individuals who can work collaboratively. People who have worked in an agile environment for some time won’t see this as news, but it is a helpful reminder for businesses who are just starting out with adopting agile. If you don’t provide the environment for collaboration and productivity, you won’t get the benefits of being agile.

And there ends our tour of Project Resource Management in the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition!